Entertainment Weekly's 27 Female Authors Who Rule Sci-Fi and Fantasy Right Now Winner of the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel Finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel Paste's 50 Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far) List “The book is full of quirkiness and playful detail...but there's an overwhelming depth and poignancy to its virtuoso ending.” —NPR From the former editor-in-chief of io9.com, a stunning Nebula Award-winning and Hugo-shortlisted novel about the end of the world—and the beginning of our future An ancient society of witches and a hipster technological startup go to war in order to prevent the world from tearing itself apart. To further complicate things, each of the groups’ most promising followers (Patricia, a brilliant witch and Laurence, an engineering “wunderkind”) may just be in love with each other. As the battle between magic and science wages in San Francisco against the backdrop of international chaos, Laurence and Patricia are forced to choose sides. But their choices will determine the fate of the planet and all mankind. In a fashion unique to Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky offers a humorous and, at times, heart-breaking exploration of growing up extraordinary in world filled with cruelty, scientific ingenuity, and magic.

So this wasn't Girl on a Train nadir-level awful, but it does rank very very low on what we've read in NUBClub. Opinions ranged from not terrible to embarrassingly bad. Where to start? First the worldbuilding in the book is just stupid. There's this attempt to create a science part of the world and a magic part of the world, conveniently embodied in two different characters who have to team up, but neither world makes sense. The magic is silly, and the technology is thin and leans directly into all those dumb hacker-movie fantasies of what technology is. And I guess the Mother Tree thing that saves the world in the end is just a magic iPad? (Thanks to Dan for that metaphor.) The plot has holes the size of canyons, and there are no graceful jumps over them in this book. There are wizard schools and geek think tanks and quasi-shamanism and Unraveling end-of-world threats and it's all just slopped together for plot contrivance. We simply couldn't believe that Anders took the time to actually work out how these things should relate. Why exactly is the world ending? What is magic in this universe? Why is tech opposed to it? One supposes the answer to these questions is 'because how would the book have a tech-and-nature moral otherwise?' The romance between the two leads was also both completely predictable and utterly nonsensical. And while I have avoided cataloguing the stylistic atrocities in the book (and there are many), the romance gives one that cannot be ignored: the single worst sex scene in NUBClub history. The phrase 'puffy nipples' was used. I'm not sure I have to say more than that. (Editor's note: 'Puffy nipples' is now the running joke phrase for bad writing at NUBClub. This book has the exemplar of bad writing for the club. Need one say more.) Every additional word I write about this book is just prolonging the suffering. The idea that this is a literary work is laughable. It's a barely coherent pile of genre-blended sludge, and best simply avoided.